Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Douthat thinks the GOP may win back congress, but they're not ready to govern yet:

Essentially, the combination of high unemployment and liberal overreach has afforded conservatives an unexpected chance to change the destiny that history seemed to have laid out for them — years if not decades in the wilderness, that is, followed by a slow and painful climb back to power in a fundamentally altered country. But if you want to change your destiny, you need to change yourself, with new ideas, better leadership, and a more realistic understanding of why you lost and what the times require of you. There have been glimmers of this kind of change in the G.O.P. But for a party that might actually have some political power at this time next year, and the responsibilities that come with it, glimmers aren’t going to be enough.

This is the problem. I can understand the electorate's disgust for the state of affairs in Washington right now. It's ugly, and the ugliest parts are the ones most often reported. But what I don't get is how you can possibly want to put the GOP back in charge? Are our memories really that bad?

Perhaps if this was a party with legitimate differences of opinion and a solid plan of their own to deal with the problems we're facing, it would be understandable. But they're not. They've shown themselves to have no real policy positions other than "the opposite of what Obama wants." This is a party that drove us deep into debt and got us mired in two unwinnable wars. Those positions haven't changed. Now the party wants to bomb Iran, fix the deficits by cutting taxes, and reform health care by making seniors unable to pay for it.

The Democrats may well deserve to be voted out of power. That doesn't make the GOP the right choice as an alternative.